The Sunday News
MPILO Central Hospital is one of the biggest referral hospitals in the country, servicing Bulawayo, as well as greater parts of Midlands and Matabeleland provinces and thus, its importance as a health care service provider can not be underestimated.
Some of the most important attributes that a service provider in the caliber and stature of Mpilo Central hospital has to strive to uphold is efficiency and public confidence. It goes without saying that the world over, health care providers are constantly striving to improve quality and efficiency, and that can only be achieved if performance management systems and quality improvement initiatives are implemented and religiously followed.
Creating and maintaining a culture of accountability and meeting high ethical standards by the staff is key for gaining public confidence. If an organisation wishes to continuously improve its operations and be second to none, so to speak, it must create a sense of accountability within employees. Accountability ensures the permanence of performance management and continuous improvement by holding people accountable on a daily basis. The totality of workers being accountable for their actions serves to create accountability at the unit, department, organisational, and industry level, and at the end of the chain, boost public confidence in the organisation.
The culture of accountability is important as it ensures improved quality of patient care and value for money spent on health care services. We have no doubt that Mpilo hospital offers a lot to the people of Zimbabwe, but we are worried by the number of incidents that point to lack of accountability, lack of adherence to ethical standards, which at the end of the day erode the confidence that the public has on the institution.
The institution is still struggling to exorcise the ghost of alleged corruption that claimed the scalp of a number of senior managers sometime this year, yet cases of negligence keep piling against medical personnel. Apart from a story in this issue, our sister paper, Chronicle, reported last week that a Bulawayo magistrate ruled that the death of a 23-year-old man who died on an operation table at the hospital was due to negligence. The magistrate, Mr Tinashe Tashaya, also ordered the office of the Prosecutor General to investigate why Mpilo hospital staff failed to avail a detailed report on the death of Mr Darlington Mangwiro, who died on the theatre table before a minor operation on his nose that had developed a growth.
Recently, a man was given a wrong injection during cancer treatment at the hospital, leading to his arm getting amputated. Mr Austin Ndlovu had his arm amputated in fear that the gangrene that started developing would spread to the rest of his body. The hospital conceded wrong doing, and did the surgery free of charge. Mr Ndlovu said he started experiencing intense pain after the injection and eventually his arm started giving off a foul stench and the skin on his arm started getting dark and his fingers became dry and numb.
“They told us that the arm had become gangrenous and had to be amputated. They’ve offered to foot the operation bills as they acknowledge that they’re at fault,” said Thankswell Moyo, a relative. It was confirmed that the gangrene was not caused by the cancer.
In another incident, a city woman whose premature twin baby girl died a few days after she was exposed to high temperatures in an incubator at the hospital two years ago, filed a $1 million lawsuit against the health facility and the Ministry of Health and Child Care. The woman accused Mpilo Central Hospital staff of gross medical negligence.
“On July 10, 2013 at about 12PM, I went for routine breast-feeding and was shocked to find my twin babies placed in an incubator despite the fact that they never suffered from hypothermia. I helplessly watched my babies being roasted and crying in pain as a result of over-exposure to the heater,” she said.
There are a number of incidents that have taken place at the hospital and have found their way to the media, giving the hospital a bad name. We believe there could be many other cases which have gone unreported in the media, but the public is well aware of them, and what the authorities have to do is to ensure workers live true to their pledge to ethical standards in the medical profession.
